i can bake an apple pie

That's right, I'm not the best baker, nor do I ever bake pies from scratch, but yes, I made this beauty. Emily was going to make a homemade apple pie for her family Thanksgiving dinner, and dessert was my assignment too. So Emily showed me her mad skills and shared her family recipe with me.

I felt proud walking in the door to my in-laws with a homemade apple pie in my hands (homemade in its entirety - including the crust), instead of the store bought pies I was planning on. But store bought pies aren't as tasty nor as fun. Thanksgiving is about cooking with your family and friends and making a meal filled with love. I was nervous to try the pie - I mean, it can't be too hard to mess this up, especially with Em's help...but I could find a way. And I'm always nervous for people to eat my food, but it was a hit. Everyone loved it and were so impressed with my skills. Thanks Em for the help and for making me look like a baker. Now my family wants me to bake them an apple pie, once a year is plenty.

Secret Swing

According to my memory, the first day of snow in the valley this winter was on October 27, 2009. Before winter would really hit, Eric and I needed to hit up Little Cottonwood Canyon and go for a hike...because there would be a little surprise waiting for us at the top.

Eric's brother Greg and his buddies hauled up wood and supplies up the canyon to build a farkin' huge swing that looks over the Salt Lake valley. They built it not too long ago and we've been dying to go, we wanted to go with Greg and Shasta before they moved to Alaska for a year but never did. So we thought our buddies Eric and Whitney would dig this hike.

Since it hadn't snowed too much in the valley, we did NOT expect there to be that much snow in the mountains and didn't quite dress the part to go trekkin' in the snow - with Whit and Eric in their shorts and Chaco's. But we were all pretty good sports and hiked along. Neither of us knew what this "swing" looked like, how big it was, or the exact location because it was off the beaten path.

The hike sure was beautiful, all the gorgeous tree's and white untouched snow...and finally we turned the bend and saw this huge opening of the valley (beautiful minus the smog). We knew once we hit this opening, the secret swing wasn't too far.

We saw the next sign, and another, then there it was. In the clearing off a hidden path lied a huge swing in the sun! It was a lot bigger than we expected, big enough for all four of us and our feet barely hung off the edge too. We were impressed...I have no idea how Greg hauled up all this wood. I want this in my house.

We could sleep here in the summer...and with that view of the valley, I could sit here all day if it wasn't cold. We chilled for a while, busted out our snacks and munched. Then we headed back down because we were losing sunlight. See you in the spring secret swing! 

where to start?

I've been dreading to blog again because my last post was Halloween, its now January and I'm so far behind in the blogging world I don't know where to begin... do I go back or start from here on out? But...the reason I like to blog is so I can look back at it. Therefore, I want to put things in chronological order so I can remember all the things we did that year and not have too many gaps (I have the worst memory and if it weren't for pictures or blogging, I wouldn't remember all the cool things we do together). Over new years, Eric and I reminisced about the year 2009, it was such a good year and we did so much, many things I didn't even blog about. So my goal is to blog more frequently this year...so I can record our many adventures together and be able to look back at it and remember the good times.

ANOTHER REASON I'm glad I started a blog is because about a month ago our somewhat new laptop (less than a year old) CRASHED AND EVERYTHING ON OUR HARD DRIVE WAS LOST!!! Including the most important thing to me: our thousands of pictures! I was devastated! Since Eric works at Best Buy, we had our savviest Geek Squad friends work on our laptop and they could do NOTHING to recover the data, the only option was to pay the few hundred bucks to have some company recover the data, we talked about it but never came to a conclusion. I don't know if my pictures are worth that much, well they are to me but that's a lot to fork out.

Oh, but Eric works at Best Buy you say? So we must have EVERYTHING backed up right? WRONG! We have an external hard drive but the last time we backed up our computer was last February, I know, we should know better and whats the point of having one if you don't back up your crap. So everything before last Feb was saved, that's a whole year of pictures, homework assignments, papers...all gone. But luckily I blog, and no matter what happens to my computer, as long as the pictures are on the internet they will remain there forever.

Yay! So, we learned our lesson, we are going to backup our computer much more often, but I am also going to continue uploading my many pictures to Facebook and Blogger so I can have them just in case something terrible happens again. So, as always I'm going back...